Achievement Vs. Fulfillment: Which Do You Want More? - a podcast by Russell Brunson

They are two conflicting concepts, the science of achievement and the art of fulfillment. Can you have them both or does one sacrifice the other?

On this episode Russell talks about the difference between the science of achievement and the art of fulfillment and how they are opposites of each other. Here are some of the fascinating things you will hear in today’s episode:

• Find out why the science of achievement is the easy part for Russell, but he struggles with the art of fulfillment.
• Find out what an event horizon is, and how it’s the opposite of routine.
• And see what project Russell is working on with his wife regarding these things.

So listen here to find out how Russell plans on getting the achievement and the fulfillment parts of life.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I want to share with you some deep thoughts about Russell Brunson today, I hope you enjoy it. With that said, let’s queue up the theme song, and I’ll be right back.

Alright so, as you guys know, last week I was at Lake Powell with my family and we had an amazing, relaxing vacation, which is really good. The problem with the entrepreneurial brain, us EPT, entrepreneurial personality types, when we try to relax we can’t and it drives us crazy because we gotta be moving forward with momentum, right.

And so while I was in the boat I started thinking about projects and things I want to do, things that are fun, and you know, I know that some of you guys know that I am working on eventually writing my next book, which is going to be the Bootstrap book, telling Clickfunnels story. But the problem is the Clickfunnels story is not done yet, so I don’t know where it’s going to go or how to tell the story. So it’s kind of like this thing that’s in the backburner that I’m going to do someday. It’s not a huge rush, but I’m excited for that.

But I was like, I need something fun to be creating. I don’t know, as a creator, I need to create. I’m sure you guys are the same way. And I’m creating this, we have a new 2 Comma Club X coaching program, which I’m creating and was a lot of fun. But I was like, I want something that just, something I can enjoy that’s just fun and light hearted, there’s no deadlines, or things. Just to create to create.

So I had an idea for a project. I’m not going to tell you the details, the name or anything, other than it’s going to be the one and only time I ever talk about personal development in any way. I’m a marketing guy, I’m gonna stick with it. But obviously I’ve had access to a lot of people that most people don’t have access to in this world and this lifetime, and I’ve  had a chance to learn from some amazing people. So I wanted to create this thing, and I don’t know what it’s going to be. I don’t know if it’s going to be a real book, if it’s like a book I’m going to be giving away for free as a lead magnet, I have no idea.

But I won’t tell you the title. I’ll tell you the subtitle. The subtitle is “The Science of Achievement, The Art of Fulfillment.” If you’ve ever heard Tony Robbins talk, he talks about that a lot of times. There’s two things you gotta master, you gotta master the science of achievement, you know the science of how to achieve anything in life. And then you have to master the art of fulfillment. And it’s funny because he talks about it a lot of times, but I always struggle with that personally because he doesn’t go deep into the whole thing, you know.

So I was sitting there at Lake Powell this week, thinking about this. I started thinking about the art and the science, and you know, the science of achievement is a lot of stuff I talk about anyway. You know, here’s the stuff I set up, here’s the things you need to do. You need to do these things in this order and you’ll have success. But the art of fulfillment is something I personally struggle with. I’m such an achiever, I want to achieve this, this, this. And you achieve the thing and you’re like, “What’s next? I want to achieve the next thing and the next thing.” And we keep moving towards, running towards this invisible goal that we don’t really know what it is. And I think a lot of times producers and entrepreneurs and people like me and probably you, we struggle a lot of times with the art of fulfillment. How do you feel fulfilled?

And it’s interesting, the art of fulfillment stuff, because it’s like art. It’s not like the science. The science is like, “Here’s the things to do to get the thing.” And art’s like, this art, you get fulfillment. And I’ve always struggled.

So as I was thinking about putting together this project, I started thinking about that, and I started just thinking about the science of achievement because that’s where my brain goes. I’m an achiever, how do I achieve? Boom, boom, here’s the thing. But then I started realizing that in the path of achievement, the art of fulfillment is almost the opposite, it’s like the yin and the yang. I started realizing, I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I started looking deeper at different topics, different concepts, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is true in so many things.’ I didn’t realize before.

So for example, and this is the example I’ll share just to kind of help you guys see what I’m, the aha I had. Everyone talks about morning routines right? If you follow any of the fitness guys, the health and fitness, the biohackers, the entrepreneurs, they all talk about, “You’ve got to have a morning routine and structure and things like that. You’ve got to wake up and you’ve got to know, I’m going to do this, this, and all these things.” Right. A lot of times they talk about how morning routine starts at night. “Here’s the thing we do before we got to bed to increase your sleep patterns.” And that’s very scientific, right? It’s the science of achievement.

If you want to have more success you’ve got to create habits. You create habits by creating a routine. You create a routine, you stick to the routine, you do that thing, it creates that outcome, and eventually you have success. And I’m a big believer in that, actually. I’m not making fun of that by any stretch. It is part of the science of achievement, is having that. By the way, if you’ve struggled with achieving things in the past, maybe it’s because you don’t have that. It’s scientific, you just do these things, the outcome it just happens. It’s just magic, it just works.

So there’s the science between it. The problem though, is it doesn’t create fulfillment. So just stick with me for a second. I did a podcast episode about this, I don’t know, 6 months ago or something. I was in Puerto Rico with Brendon Burchard and a big mastermind group with a bunch of cool people. And one of the guys there was a guy named Craig Clemens and Craig was sitting there, and he started talking about how our brains work. He said, “You know, a lot of times as we get older we say the years are getting shorter, it seems like time is flying. The reality is its actually true. The reason why is because your brain looks for patterns of the same thing happening over and over and over again and it deletes them. Because it’s like, I don’t even remember this because we do it every single morning, we do this every single week. Every single thing.’

And so he said, “So literally your brain is deleting those things that keep happening. So your life seems shorter because it literally is shorter. Those memories, every morning from 9 to, you know 7 til 10 it’s the same things. I don’t even remember this. It’s the same thing, just delete it. So because of that you lose those 5 hours in your memory every day. So your life goes faster, the years go faster, days go faster, weeks go faster, and your life goes faster.”

He said, “that problem is, if you want to extend time,” he called them event horizons, and if you go back and listen to that podcast episode, I talk a lot about them. But it’s interesting because he’s like, this mastermind group we’re in, the very first year we did it, we all met in Wyoming and we flew helicopters, and we shot guns, and we rode horses and it was crazy. He was like, “That was an event horizon. I will remember that experience for the rest of my life. The second year the mastermind came to Puerto Rico, it was amazing, we’re in this new spot, this new place and it was amazing. This is year three and we’re in Puerto Rico again. I’m having an amazing time, the problem is this experience is so similar to the last one, most of its going to get deleted from my memory and it’s just going to be gone. My brain will just delete it because it’s like, oh this is a routine, I’ve done this before. You lose that.”

I think he was trying to get us to do something crazy that night because he’s like, “We need to create an event horizon right now.”  And he wanted us, I can’t remember what the thing was, but he wanted to some crazy thing to stick this in our brains so we don’t lose this moment and this experience because it was so similar to the thing before.

With event horizon I started thinking, oh my gosh, if you think about those two things, this is the yin and the yang of fulfillment and happiness, that are the science of achievement and the art of fulfillment. It’s the yin and the yang, because if you want achievement, you want to achieve the thing you need to create structure and routine and have this thing where you just do the things that create the result at the end. So you do that and because of that, boom, you move towards getting the achievement. But the problem is your brain is deleting the section every single day, and all the sudden your days are shorter, your life is shorter, you’re not fulfilled, you’re not getting the art of fulfillment because of that.

So the art of fulfillment is the opposite. It’s the literal opposite of this first thing, right. It is you coming and saying, “We are not going to do routine, we have to do these crazy things so it extends our life, extends our happiness, we feel fulfillment in the moment.” And it’s this yin and yang. So that’s kind of the thing I want to explore in this project, is that. The personal development side, because I think so many times in personal development we focus on one or the other, when we have to realize they’re actually all opposites.

And I think, as I’m going through each principle that’s had a big effect on my life, I look for the opposite of it. And the opposite of it is, it’s funny, if this one thing is giving me happiness, it’s also the thing that didn’t give me achievement and visa versa, and it’s so strange and so fascinating when you look at that. So this is the work I want to start working on in my free time, just for fun, just exploring that and writing about it.

So my wife and I are doing this, we’re going to be picking a topic for each thing. So this one is going to be the first yin/yang, personal development versus event horizons. Excuse me, the morning routine versus event horizon. So it’s like, we need to create these routines for ourselves and for our kids to be able to achieve a certain thing. So what do we want to achieve? Figure that out, then reverse engineer it to build a morning routine that helps us to achieve that. So there’s your science of achievement.

But then, sprinkled inside of that we need to have these event horizons that cause the happiness, the art of happiness. That way we can have the achievement and the happiness, the fulfillment as well. And it’s figuring out the yin and the yang of these things.

Anyway, that’s a project I’m excited to work on. But I just wanted to get that thought in your head because a lot of times the thing you’re doing to achieve, and you’re killing yourself, burning, hustling at whatever it is you’re trying to get achievement in, it’s actually taking away your art of fulfillment. So how you bring that fulfillment into all these things.

So start looking for that, as you’re looking for, these are the things I’m doing to achieve, what’s the exact…notice this is moving me towards achievement but it’s probably pulling you away from fulfillment, away from happiness. And then how do I create the yin and yang inside of here so I can get both? Because if you go one way or the other way, you’re either going to be an achiever who’s miserable, or you’re going to be someone who’s happy but never accomplishing anything in your life. And I think there’s a happy medium between the two.

Because I know for so much of my life I’ve chased achievement and I think part of me keeps chasing it, hoping I’ll find more happiness there. And it’s like, no, that’s not actually where happiness is. The achievement’s there, but the happiness is on the opposite.

Anyway, I hope that helps, at least gets the wheels in your head spinning. I’m excited and hopefully someday this will turn into a project. And maybe it won’t be. Maybe this podcast episode is all that it actually is. But like I said, my plan is for my wife and I to pick a chapter, a topic and then study it, learn about both sides of it, figure things out, create our routine, create our event horizons, create something amazing, and then from that, that becomes chapter one. Then next we’ll pick our next topic and then do it, spend time on it, figure it out and keep going.

So anyway, I’m excited, it’ll be a fun project. And hopefully this, anyway, a glimpse behind Russell’s mind, what he thinks about when he’s supposed to not be thinking about things. Anyway, I appreciate you guys. Thanks for paying attention, for hanging out. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a screenshot on your phone or wherever you are and share it on social and tag me on it. I’d love to see it.

Plus also post your comments. I love hearing your comments about why you like this episode, what you thought, what things that sparked your mind. That helps me to know what to create and what to create more of, what to create less of. When I don’t hear anything back from anybody, I don’t ever talk about that again. When you guys get excited, then I go deeper. So let me know if you’re excited about this topic, tag me in it wherever you post it, and I appreciate you guys all for listening, thanks so much and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye everybody.

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